I thought viruses used to be considered non-living since they could not reproduce on their own... They hae to use their host's cellular machinary to reproduce.
If as you say, more than half the company was laid off and layoffs are still happening then who wouldn't be watching their backs?
Poor morale is just going to be a fact of life in this environment. On one hand the employer probably isn't too worried about this because people won't be leaving anytime soon (where would they go?)
Back in the mid to late 70's my dad had a Fiat sedan and being tinkerers (more people tinkered on their cars then it seems, and if you had a Fiat you pretty much always had to tinker with it:) we tried some of the water-vapor injection ideas that were around then (supposed to give a 10% boost in milage) - but it didn't really work. Then we got the idea: what if we electrolyzed the water into hydrogen & oxygen and sent the gases into the carburator. We tried it out, it's pretty easy to do (though I'm not sure how you'd do it on a fuel injected car - I suppose you'd pump it into the air intake as shown on the diagram on one of those sites)... Well, our results were pretty inconclusive. We were gonna experiment with some other ideas related to this, but that's about the time I went off to college.
I'd argue that the H1 program should just be *enforced*. H1Bs, as written in law, *require* the visa holder to be paid prevailing wages, and *require* something called 'Labor Certification', which supposedly proves that there are no available native workers in the local market who can perform those functions.
Well that sounds just lovely on paper... but how do you think companies go about making sure that there are no native workers available in the local market who can perform the job? They make a very specific job posting where they specify the requirements in such a way that no one (or perhaps only the H1B they have in mind) has the right mix of qualifications, for examples see the recent article Take This Tech Job and Shove it in Salon.
I'm surprised to see only one posting about YAML. It seems to have several advantages over XML: 1) it's easy for humans to read and write (and for that matter, if you're programatically generating YAML it's as least as easy to generate as XML) 2) It's more compact than XML which is important for serialization in an RPC or distributed object scheme. I suspect that YAML also compresses a lot more than XML, too (compress->serialize->decompress)
YAML is great. Easy to read _and_ write. It's what XML could have been. Also, it seems to me that perhaps it's more compact than XML (and certainly it can be compressed to much smaller sizes) which is important for various RPC and distributed object schemes.
Let's see, SCO's revenue is ~$20million/quarter and isn't the rule something like 4x revenue, so for $80million IBM could buy SCO thus killing the lawsuit and put SCO out of it's misery (and spare the rest of us all the FUD SCO is spreading)....a small price to pay for IBM.
I thought there were some pretty high profile cases many years ago where one of the razor makers (Gillette?) tried to shut out other companies from making blades compatible with their razors but it was ruled that they could not restrict other blade makers.
Also, wasn't there a case where Polaroid tried to keep (Kodak? or was it the other way around) from making film for their cameras? (and then in the Mainframe arena there was some lawsuit between IBM and Amdahl where IBM was trying to keep Amdahl's tape units out of IBM's mainframes - IBM lost as I recall). These are all pretty fuzzy rememberances, perhaps someone who knows these cases could comment?
Anyway, something seems pretty screwy here, it seems like there is a lot of precedent out there that is totally opposite of this ruling.
In our last episode the Beaver and Wally were on their way to the Prior Art tavern...
Beaver: "Gee, Wally, why do you figure they call it the 'Prior Art' tavern? Do you think it's because of all the old pictures hanging on the walls?"
Wally: "Probably has something to do the previous owner's name being Art or something stupid like that."
Eddie: "Kids, you're both wrong! It has someth'in to do with legal stuff that used to be related to patents. Hey kid, why don't you quit being so lazy and look it up on google"
Beaver: "Can it, Eddie, I'm no kid I'm over 50 and so are you! Wally was right - he always used to tell me you were a smart ass on that old show... what's google, anyways?"
Wally: "No I didn't! You couldn't even say 'ass' on TV back then! Actually I kind'a think Eddie might be right, 'prior art' had someth'in to do with patents back in the old days,back when they built this tavern next to the patent office and named it 'Prior Art'."
Beaver: "Hey Wally, getta load of this! It's another one of them swell software patents!"
Wally: "Well, you remember what the memo said, if it's got the the word 'web' in it then you should accept it, otherwise you're gonna get it when the commisioner gets back."
Beaver: "Not only does it have 'web' it's got 'web assets' and 'version control', what the heck is that?"
Wally: "No idea, but it sounds good. Hey just stamp the thing with the 'ACCEPTED' stamp and let the lawyers sort it out; we're gonna be late for beer at The Prior Art tavern."
Beaver: "Yeah, wouldn't want them lawyers to be outta work, now would we. Well, that's ten I've accepted before lunch, let's get to The Prior Art, pronto!"
I don't want a car that's cool from a geek perspective. I want a car that's cool from a motorhead perspective.
I tend to agree. I don't like power/electric everything either... it's hard to find a decent car anymore that doesn't have power windows. I also much prefer a manual transmission to an automatic one. But, I do want a radio/CD/MP3 player.
This looks pretty cool, but no way I can afford one at $5K... You could do the slow bits of code in C targetting the PPC and the fast stuff in VHDL or Verilog...
Well, there have been a couple of attempts, but nothing complete...
Right now the most interesting one is a VHDL frontend for GCC called GHDL.
Also note that you need a lot more than a simulator to get it to work with this board: you need a synthesis tool that can map into the Xilinx part. The FPGA companies tend to keep their formats quite proprietary, so don't expect any open source tools for synthesis and tech mapping any time soon.... (unfortunately).
In India they have a comic strip called Asok...
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 2, Funny
And Asok has an intern named Dilbert.
But the general public doesn't give a damn
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This subject of the outsourcing of tech jobs isn't on any politician's radar screen. The general public is unaware of what's happening so it'll be too late by the time this (might) become a political issue - the jobs will be gone by then.
Think about it: When the manufacturing jobs were being sent offshore in the 80's and 90's did you (as an engineer) really care? Some of us were a bit concerned, but not enough to even motivate us to write our congresscritter. Now that our engineering jobs are being outsourced we're getting upset, but who's going to come to our rescue? Nobody, the general public doesn't have a clue (and of course, it can be argued that nobody _can_ come to our rescue).
[as a footnote, it's interesting to note that a lot of those displaced manufacuring workers in the 80's and 90's were encouraged to retrain as software engineers - I've worked with a few of them.]
Setting up 'Tech Unions' here would only cause corporations to outsource more vigorously.
No, we need to send branches of American Unions like the AFL-CIO to India - that would be the best thing for US engineers in the long run. (outsource the Unions:-)
"Engineers of India UNITE! Stop working for slave wages! Stop working long hours! Join the Union!"
Re:How's it feel to be a middle man?
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 3, Insightful
the salary those overseas workers start to command. After awhile they become almost as expensive as the native labor
Yes, eventually the labor costs over in places like India are going to rise while at the same time labor costs here will fall... An equilibrium _will_ be reached eventually (pictures cities in India looking a lot more like American cities and cities in the US looking a lot more like Indian cities)...
The problem is that it will take a generation or two for this to happen and in the meantime we're going to have a lot of displaced workers here in the US trying to eke out a living at much lower salaries then they pervioulsy made.
From here on out eBay should ban lawyers from buying, selling OR commenting.
"Are you a Lawer? If so, we'd like to tell you about LawBay, our new site for Lawyers only. No comments of any kind are allowed on LawBay - this allows us to keep our costs low. No actual buying or selling actually occurs on LawBay - you can post pictures of stuff you would have liked to have sold and other lawyers can look at those pictures, but no actual transactions are allowed - again to keep our legal costs low."
Seems to me that most big corporations have gutted their research budgets - especially when it comes to pure research like PARC was doing. For that kind of reasearch to take place a company has to be able to look beyond the bottom line for the next quarter and few seem to be able to do that. What's happended to Bell Labs? (is it somewhere in Lucent?) How about HP? Used to be a great engineering company, but now it's just a marketing company looking to put the HP logo on OEM products....look for a line of HP athletic shoes coming soon to a KMart near you!
The replies to this article mostly seem to run in two veins: "Those Indian engineers can do OK with the low-end, simple development tasks that we don't want to do anyway."
and
"My job is safe because I'm at the highend architectural level... blah, blah"
The first type of reply smacks of some sort of racism that tends to think that no other country can be as good at software development as the US so we don't have to worry about the 'good' jobs leaving. The second type is just naieve.
Sure it _was_ the lowerlevel software jobs that were being sent over to India at first, but now that's changing and we'd better be ready for this change... It essentially means that even after this recession ends and the economy is doing well again that it will still be difficult for sofware engineers (and hardware engineers too, those jobs are starting to go overseas as well) to find jobs. Why? Because the jobs that are being sent over now will lead to more of the same as companies find that they can significantly cut their costs. In the 'global economy' if you're being paid significantly more than your employer could pay someone somewhere else to do the job (and just as well) then it's only a matter of time... and this is especially true of engineering jobs which are much easier to 'export' than manufacturing jobs were (no equipment or materials to move).
A couple of weeks ago a local paper interviewed a local venture capitalist and asked him where he thought the Oregon economy was headed. His analysis is actually pretty good... he focuses on outsourcing of engineering jobs and how that will slow the recovery in the high-tech sector. He then gives the example of Mentor Graphics and how they're going to invest $40million in a R&D center in India. When he asked them why they were going to do this, they told him: "they said they can't hire anyone graduating from engineering schools here because they're just not prepared, they're just not ready to go into that sophisticated end of the business." Now of course I think their reply is disingenuous - in the current economy they could find plenty of engineers to staff their R&D center if they built it here, but that's beside the point. The point is that here is a company that's going to move some of the 'sophisticated' engineering jobs over to India.
Another data point: This past summer I did a contract job at Intel. I've kept in contact with the people I worked with there and I've asked several times if they'll be hiring again and of course the reply is always that there's a hiring freeze. Last week I had lunch with one of these guys and he told me that he'd like to hire me again but they can't do any hiring in the US and then added "But if you were in India, we're hiring over there".
Experience has shown that 'shipping jobs overseas' actually CREATES more jobs here at home
And what kind of jobs might those be this time? Starbucks? Burger King?
I can kind of see your point when it comes to manufacturing jobs, but now that the 'thinking' jobs are leaving I'm not sure what'll be left for us to do . In the 80's as manufacturing jobs left the US many of those displaced workers were encouraged to get into software engineering since it paid better anyway. What should software engineers be studying now? Dentistry? Auto Mechanics? (at least those jobs can't be sent overseas)
Software development isn't an incredibly difficult skill.. in particular the types of software development that is being shipped overseas.
You're deluding yourself if you think that it's only the lower-end development jobs that are being sent overseas. Check this article . It's an interview with a venture capitalist about his take on where the Oregon economy is headed. Towards the end he talks about the impact of outsourcing engineering jobs and how that will slow the recovery in the high-tech sector. He talks about how Mentor Graphics is opening a $40million R&D center in India. When he asked them why, they told him: "they said they can't hire anyone graduating from engineering schools here because they're just not prepared, they're just not ready to go into that sophisticated end of the business." Now personally, I don't think that's the real reason (the real reason is that they can pay Indian engineers about 1/3 of what they pay their American counterparts) but that quote should be sending chills down the spine of every US developer who reads it.
I have made it a strong point to become an expert in system architecture and design, and that has kept me very comfortably employed no matter the economic conditions....keep dreaming. Read the article that started this thread. India is moving into the high-end of the development process now. It's time we software engineers woke up and smelled the chai.
Can Rexx do: 2**1000: 10715086071862673209484250490600018105614048117 055 33607443750388370351051124936122493198378815695858 12759467291755314682518714528569231404359845775746 98574803934567774824230985421074605062371141877954 18215304647498358194126739876755916554394607706291 45711964776865421676604298316526243868372056680693 76...but really, how does being able to do this mean that a scripting language 'has no equal'...
Or when you say that 'Rexx has no equal' do you mean that you can't check for equality in Rexx?...must be pretty tough...
It would be wonderful to have a Ruby compiler... But I'm not sure it's possible to compile a language as dynamic as Ruby where you can:
- add methods to objects or classes at runtime
- Do things like conditional inheritance or conditional mixins
- mixin modules to objects or classes at runtime (extend)
Ruby is extremely dynamic... I'm not sure how you compile something like that down to static object code...
Slashdot Mirror
I thought viruses used to be considered non-living since they could not reproduce on their own... They hae to use their host's cellular machinary to reproduce.
But perhaps the thinking on this has changed...
If as you say, more than half the company was laid off and layoffs are still happening then who wouldn't be watching their backs?
Poor morale is just going to be a fact of life in this environment. On one hand the employer probably isn't too worried about this because people won't be leaving anytime soon (where would they go?)
Back in the mid to late 70's my dad had a Fiat sedan and being tinkerers (more people tinkered on their cars then it seems, and if you had a Fiat you pretty much always had to tinker with it :) we tried some of the water-vapor injection ideas that were around then (supposed to give a 10% boost in milage) - but it didn't really work. Then we got the idea: what if we electrolyzed the water into hydrogen & oxygen and sent the gases into the carburator. We tried it out, it's pretty easy to do (though I'm not sure how you'd do it on a fuel injected car - I suppose you'd pump it into the air intake as shown on the diagram on one of those sites)... Well, our results were pretty inconclusive. We were gonna experiment with some other ideas related to this, but that's about the time I went off to college.
They should know better than to keep critical services running with M$ software. Is this just plain laziness or stupidity?
I'd argue that the H1 program should just be *enforced*. H1Bs, as written in law, *require* the visa holder to be paid prevailing wages, and *require* something called 'Labor Certification', which supposedly proves that there are no available native workers in the local market who can perform those functions.
Well that sounds just lovely on paper... but how do you think companies go about making sure that there are no native workers available in the local market who can perform the job? They make a very specific job posting where they specify the requirements in such a way that no one (or perhaps only the H1B they have in mind) has the right mix of qualifications, for examples see the recent article Take This Tech Job and Shove it in Salon.
I'm surprised to see only one posting about YAML. It seems to have several advantages over XML:
1) it's easy for humans to read and write
(and for that matter, if you're programatically generating YAML it's as least as easy to generate as XML)
2) It's more compact than XML which is important for serialization in an RPC or distributed object scheme. I suspect that YAML also compresses a lot more than XML, too (compress->serialize->decompress)
YAML is great. Easy to read _and_ write. It's what XML could have been. Also, it seems to me that perhaps it's more compact than XML (and certainly it can be compressed to much smaller sizes) which is important for various RPC and distributed object schemes.
I seriously doubt he'd even get an interview today, much less on-the-job experience, without an engineering major of some sort.
I seriously doubt engineering majors are getting any interviews these days.
Everything you say makes great sense in theory, and I wish I lived in a world where talent and drive alone gets you jobs.
That would be a nice change...
...and thus shut them up.
...a small price to pay for IBM.
Let's see, SCO's revenue is ~$20million/quarter and isn't the rule something like 4x revenue, so for $80million IBM could buy SCO thus killing the lawsuit and put SCO out of it's misery (and spare the rest of us all the FUD SCO is spreading).
I thought there were some pretty high profile cases many years ago where one of the razor makers (Gillette?) tried to shut out other companies from making blades compatible with their razors but it was ruled that they could not restrict other blade makers.
Also, wasn't there a case where Polaroid tried to keep (Kodak? or was it the other way around) from making film for their cameras? (and then in the Mainframe arena there was some lawsuit between IBM and Amdahl where IBM was trying to keep Amdahl's tape units out of IBM's mainframes - IBM lost as I recall). These are all pretty fuzzy rememberances, perhaps someone who knows these cases could comment?
Anyway, something seems pretty screwy here, it seems like there is a lot of precedent out there that is totally opposite of this ruling.
In our last episode
the Beaver and Wally were on their way to the Prior Art tavern...
Beaver: "Gee, Wally, why do you figure they call it the 'Prior Art' tavern? Do you think it's because of all the old pictures hanging on the walls?"
Wally: "Probably has something to do the previous owner's name being Art or something stupid like that."
Eddie: "Kids, you're both wrong! It has someth'in to do with legal stuff that used to be related to patents. Hey kid, why don't you quit being so lazy and look it up on google"
Beaver: "Can it, Eddie, I'm no kid I'm over 50 and so are you! Wally was right - he always used to tell me you were a smart ass on that old show... what's google, anyways?"
Wally: "No I didn't! You couldn't even say 'ass' on TV back then! Actually I kind'a think Eddie might be right, 'prior art' had someth'in to do with patents back in the old days,back when they built this tavern next to the patent office and named it 'Prior Art'."
Beaver: "Hey Wally, getta load of this! It's another one of them swell software patents!"
Wally: "Well, you remember what the memo said, if it's got the the word 'web' in it then you should accept it, otherwise you're gonna get it when the commisioner gets back."
Beaver: "Not only does it have 'web' it's got 'web assets' and 'version control', what the heck is that?"
Wally: "No idea, but it sounds good. Hey just stamp the thing with the 'ACCEPTED' stamp and let the lawyers sort it out; we're gonna be late for beer at The Prior Art tavern."
Beaver: "Yeah, wouldn't want them lawyers to be outta work, now would we. Well, that's ten I've accepted before lunch, let's get to The Prior Art, pronto!"
I don't want a car that's cool from a geek perspective. I want a car that's cool from a motorhead perspective.
I tend to agree. I don't like power/electric everything either... it's hard to find a decent car anymore that doesn't have power windows. I also much prefer a manual transmission to an automatic one. But, I do want a radio/CD/MP3 player.
The Mini Cooper S is pretty cool, btw.
...like for maybe $100?
This looks pretty cool, but no way I can afford one at $5K... You could do the slow bits of code in C targetting the PPC and the fast stuff in VHDL or Verilog...
Well, there have been a couple of attempts, but nothing complete...
Right now the most interesting one is a VHDL frontend for GCC called GHDL.
Also note that you need a lot more than a simulator to get it to work with this board: you need a synthesis tool that can map into the Xilinx part. The FPGA companies tend to keep their formats quite proprietary, so don't expect any open source tools for synthesis and tech mapping any time soon.... (unfortunately).
And Asok has an intern named Dilbert.
This subject of the outsourcing of tech jobs isn't on any politician's radar screen. The general public is unaware of what's happening so it'll be too late by the time this (might) become a political issue - the jobs will be gone by then.
Think about it: When the manufacturing jobs were being sent offshore in the 80's and 90's did you (as an engineer) really care? Some of us were a bit concerned, but not enough to even motivate us to write our congresscritter. Now that our engineering jobs are being outsourced we're getting upset, but who's going to come to our rescue? Nobody, the general public doesn't have a clue (and of course, it can be argued that nobody _can_ come to our rescue).
[as a footnote, it's interesting to note that a lot of those displaced manufacuring workers in the 80's and 90's were encouraged to retrain as software engineers - I've worked with a few of them.]
Setting up 'Tech Unions' here would only cause corporations to outsource more vigorously.
:-)
No, we need to send branches of American Unions like the AFL-CIO to India - that would be the best thing for US engineers in the long run. (outsource the Unions
"Engineers of India UNITE! Stop working for slave wages! Stop working long hours! Join the Union!"
the salary those overseas workers start to command. After awhile they become almost as expensive as the native labor
Yes, eventually the labor costs over in places like India are going to rise while at the same time labor costs here will fall... An equilibrium _will_ be reached eventually (pictures cities in India looking a lot more like American cities and cities in the US looking a lot more like Indian cities)...
The problem is that it will take a generation or two for this to happen and in the meantime we're going to have a lot of displaced workers here in the US trying to eke out a living at much lower salaries then they pervioulsy made.
From here on out eBay should ban lawyers from buying, selling OR commenting.
"Are you a Lawer? If so, we'd like to tell you about LawBay, our new site for Lawyers only. No comments of any kind are allowed on LawBay - this allows us to keep our costs low. No actual buying or selling actually occurs on LawBay - you can post pictures of stuff you would have liked to have sold and other lawyers can look at those pictures, but no actual transactions are allowed - again to keep our legal costs low."
Seems to me that most big corporations have gutted their research budgets - especially when it comes to pure research like PARC was doing. For that kind of reasearch to take place a company has to be able to look beyond the bottom line for the next quarter and few seem to be able to do that. What's happended to Bell Labs? (is it somewhere in Lucent?) How about HP? Used to be a great engineering company, but now it's just a marketing company looking to put the HP logo on OEM products. ...look for a line of HP athletic shoes coming soon to a KMart near you!
The replies to this article mostly seem to run in two veins:
... blah, blah"
"Those Indian engineers can do OK with the low-end, simple development tasks that we don't want to do anyway."
and
"My job is safe because I'm at the highend architectural level
The first type of reply smacks of some sort of racism that tends to think that no other country can be as good at software development as the US so we don't have to worry about the 'good' jobs leaving. The second type is just naieve.
Sure it _was_ the lowerlevel software jobs that were being sent over to India at first, but now that's changing and we'd better be ready for this change... It essentially means that even after this recession ends and the economy is doing well again that it will still be difficult for sofware engineers (and hardware engineers too, those jobs are starting to go overseas as well) to find jobs.
Why? Because the jobs that are being sent over now will lead to more of the same as companies find that they can significantly cut their costs. In the 'global economy' if you're being paid significantly more than your employer could pay someone somewhere else to do the job (and just as well) then it's only a matter of time... and this is especially true of engineering jobs which are much easier to 'export' than manufacturing jobs were (no equipment or materials to move).
A couple of weeks ago a local paper interviewed
a local venture capitalist and asked him where he thought the Oregon economy was headed. His analysis is actually pretty good... he focuses on outsourcing of engineering jobs and how that will slow the recovery in the high-tech sector. He then gives the example of Mentor Graphics and how they're going to invest $40million in a R&D center in India. When he asked them why they were going to do this, they told him: "they said they can't hire anyone graduating from engineering schools here because they're just not prepared, they're just not ready to go into that sophisticated end of the business." Now of course I think their reply is disingenuous - in the current economy they could find plenty of engineers to staff their R&D center if they built it here, but that's beside the point. The point is that here is a company that's going to move some of the 'sophisticated' engineering jobs over to India.
Another data point: This past summer I did a contract job at Intel. I've kept in contact with the people I worked with there and I've asked several times if they'll be hiring again and of course the reply is always that there's a hiring freeze. Last week I had lunch with one of these guys and he told me that he'd like to hire me again but they can't do any hiring in the US and then added "But if you were in India, we're hiring over there".
Experience has shown that 'shipping jobs overseas' actually CREATES more jobs here at home
...keep dreaming. Read the article that started this thread. India is moving into the high-end of the development process now. It's time we software engineers woke up and smelled the chai.
And what kind of jobs might those be this time? Starbucks? Burger King?
I can kind of see your point when it comes to manufacturing jobs, but now that the 'thinking' jobs are leaving I'm not sure what'll be left for us to do . In the 80's as manufacturing jobs left the US many of those displaced workers were encouraged to get into software engineering since it paid better anyway. What should software engineers be studying now? Dentistry? Auto Mechanics? (at least those jobs can't be sent overseas)
Software development isn't an incredibly difficult skill.. in particular the types of software development that is being shipped overseas.
You're deluding yourself if you think that it's only the lower-end development jobs that are being sent overseas. Check this article
. It's an interview with a venture capitalist about his take on where the Oregon economy is headed. Towards the end he talks about the impact of outsourcing engineering jobs and how that will slow the recovery in the high-tech sector. He talks about how Mentor Graphics is opening a $40million R&D center in India. When he asked them why, they told him: "they said they can't hire anyone graduating from engineering schools here because they're just not prepared, they're just not ready to go into that sophisticated end of the business." Now personally, I don't think that's the real reason (the real reason is that they can pay Indian engineers about 1/3 of what they pay their American counterparts) but that quote should be sending chills down the spine of every US developer who reads it.
I have made it a strong point to become an expert in system architecture and design, and that has kept me very comfortably employed no matter the economic conditions.
Can Rexx do: :7 055 33607443750388370351051124936122493198378815695858 12759467291755314682518714528569231404359845775746 98574803934567774824230985421074605062371141877954 18215304647498358194126739876755916554394607706291 45711964776865421676604298316526243868372056680693 76 ...but really, how does being able to do this mean that a scripting language 'has no equal'...
...must be pretty tough...
2**1000
1071508607186267320948425049060001810561404811
Or when you say that 'Rexx has no equal' do you mean that you can't check for equality in Rexx?
It would be wonderful to have a Ruby compiler...
But I'm not sure it's possible to compile a language as dynamic as Ruby where you can:
- add methods to objects or classes at runtime
- Do things like conditional inheritance or conditional mixins
- mixin modules to objects or classes at runtime (extend)
Ruby is extremely dynamic... I'm not sure how you compile something like that down to static object code...